Gamedziner wrote:Is there any "small" (less than 1000 cells) means by which those two cells could be prevented from appearing, thus allowing a sort of flotilla knightship?

If something like that existed, it would have to move at the same speed as the knightship to keep doing its suppression work, and so it would be a very good candidate knightship on its own.

It might work to start a new search for a "support" ship that suppresses those two cells in the almost-knightship, and see if any solutions happen to come up for the different possible searchable shapes. I would expect that one or more people have already tried something along those lines, but I don't know for sure.

It would be a higher multiplier almost certainly, but could have fewer overall spaceships per cycle. Not sure how easy it would be to synthesize but I don't know, there's already a mountain of synthesis problems with all the HWSS in the current best helix.

Although I'm not experienced with building helices to be specific periods, I think I have to agree with the above: to actually gain over the 11c/24 burn reaction, the amount of time spent burning must be very long relative to the lengths of the fuses.

However, I do believe there is room for improvement in helix design. By starting with a somewhat odd LWSS-on-MWSS flotilla I was able to find a helix edge component in a few different variations (low *WSS options on top, smaller area options below. Left-most is for comparison):

I don't know if it's known, but I figure there's probably some other useful corner-turn reactions out there we don't know about yet. If it produced the same glider four gens earlier it would allow for a 4x 17c/45 helix, but since it doesn't, the maximum speed for a period 180 helix is only 3c/7...

EDIT: Interestingly, the Coe ship by itself can function as a helix edge. Not only that, but the glider ends up displaced over 20 cells at nearly lightspeed. Unfortunately the big plume created from the reaction prevents it from being all that useful:

What's interesting about this one is that the back can likely be completed symmetrically--observe the behavior around the cells in white. I'm not sure how to get any of our existing spaceship searchers to continue it as a symmetrical search while the front remains asymmetric, though.

This would be relevant to complete because of the relatively loose connections in the asymmetric front. It means that the full ship, if it turns out to be smallish, will be a decent candidate for glider synthesis.

The "best" c/9 partials that I'm aware of are the ones posted on page 2 of this thread (even-symmetric partials here and odd-symmetric partials here). It's hard to say if these are "good" partials. None of them are very long, and they generally are all "strongly connected" (only the first even-width partial seems to have a "loosely connected" front end). You could try extending these with zfind as explained here.

I find it kind of interesting that a lot of high-period ships involve pushing either a loaf or a beehive. We have the dragon that pushes beehives, the loafer which pushes a loaf, and the c/8 partial here and the monotonic even symmetric c/9 both push two loaves...

muzik wrote:I find it kind of interesting that a lot of high-period ships involve pushing either a loaf or a beehive. We have the dragon that pushes beehives, the loafer which pushes a loaf, and the c/8 partial here and the monotonic even symmetric c/9 both push two loaves...

Maybe some sort of engineerable reaction could be in the making?

People have talked about this a lot over the years, but all of these ships/partials seem to be beehives/loaves followed by "space junk". I haven't seen anyone actually propose how to find the seemingly random back ends (besides using the tools we already have for low-period spaceship searches).

muzik wrote:Are there any search programs that search exclusively for the back ends of spaceships, so that we could potentially link them up to front ends?

I think this is essentially what Tim Coe did to find the snail, but I could be misunderstanding the explanation. (Edit: I was wrong)

gfind has a reverse option that searches for spaceships from the back, but in Life it is much slower than the forward search, so I'm not sure if it would help at all. I think you would essentially need to run the forward and reverse searches at the same time, and periodically check to see if any of the reverse partials could complete any of the forward partials. This adds a lot of extra complexity to the program and might not speed it up very much. I think it would be better (and easier) to take the current forward search programs and find ways to distribute them among multiple CPUs and multiple computers.

muzik wrote:Well, what I was mainly thinking of doing is searching for relatively long back partials, and attaching them to the backs of known front ends. Namely the ones that have been posted in this forum

The problem is, most of the partials posted on the forums are at widths where no spaceships exist. Thus, to complete the spaceship the back partials would have to be even wider than the front partials. Since reverse searches are so slow, it would actually be faster to start with your front partial result and try to extend it at a larger width.

A while back I posted some of the first ships that came out of a c/6 odd symmetric search started at width 19 and continued at width 17. This search continued and finally completed and found more ships. I looked through the output file and saw a matching several rows with Sokwe's continuation of Kazyan's asymmetric front end.

You asked if I could provide more precision on when the variety of small c/4 ships were found. My records and memory are scattered and sometime between last December and March is a realistic approximation.

The snail was found by a standard search from the front. I have tried some searches from the back and they just don't work well.

So how would one actually find the spaceships then? Since they're called "partials" do you simply find a rear end for them all, try to attach some random stuff to the back, or (most likely) run a promising front end through searches?

muzik wrote:So how would one actually find the spaceships then? Since they're called "partials" do you simply find a rear end for them all, try to attach some random stuff to the back, or (most likely) run a promising front end through searches?

Ususally, it's the last one: use a known partial result as the starting point of a gfind/zfind/knight2/WLS/JLS search.

I described how to extend partial results with zfind here. This is closely related to extending partial results in gfind, which Paul Tooke describes here (row ordering is the same as in zfind). I know that knight2 can also extend partial results, but I don't know how to input the initial rows.

muzik wrote:Whenever I get round to trying to figure out how to work them, what would be a good usable partial to test if it's working?

It doesn't matter, as long as you can tell that the output looks right. In my post on extending partials with zfind, I extended the front end of the dragon as an example. I could quickly tell that I had input the rows correctly, because the output partials had the same front end as the dragon. If you mess up, it usually causes the search to terminate almost immediately, with the longest partial being 2 or 3 rows.

Edit:

muzik wrote:Here's a c/8 partial from the other thread

I tried to extend this partial at width 18 using zfind, but it didn't find a ship. Here are the longest partials: